Anglophile Households and British Travellers in Late Eighteenth-Century Vienna: ‘A Very Numerous and Pleasant English Colony’

Abstract

‘Anglophilia’ was a Europe-wide phenomenon during the eighteenth century, and in Austria and particularly Vienna this affinity for things and persons ‘English’ was widespread. For many British visitors in late eighteenth-century Vienna the attraction was apparently mutual. With remarkable consistency, both private correspondence and the published reports of British travelers included praise for the hospitality and openness of two Viennese households, those of the Thun and Pergen families. During several decades, until the early 1790s, a substantial if indeterminate number of British individuals and groups arrived in Vienna and received a consistently enthusiastic welcome in the residences of the countesses Thun and Pergen. Why a predilection for Vienna should have developed among visitors from the British Isles, which lacked a shared religion, dynastic connection, or ease of access to the Viennese capital, is a question that merits attention. Interactions that occurred in and around these anglophile households can serve as instructive examples of contemporary British-Austrian ‘sociability’ in action.